8 October 2020, Canberra, Australia
As a kid, you're asked what you want to do when you grow up. Your answer is based on what you see around you. If your mum and dad work in an office all day, you might say you want to be a lawyer or a scientist. You might assume, even as a kid, that you'll go and get a higher education. But if none of the adults in your life went to university, you just don't know how to picture yourself there. You haven't got the living, breathing example of the sort of person that goes and gets themselves a degree, so you don't see it as something you'll probably do. For me, I never thought I'd make it to uni. I always saw university as being for someone else. The sorts of people who went to uni in my eyes were the ones on TV. They were the politicians making decisions a world away. They were the journalists asking them thorny questions and delivering every bit of daily news with a deep voice and a steady pace. They were the scientists making breakthroughs and people who wore suits in the cities.
It isn't like that for everyone. When you live in Sydney or Melbourne and your parents both went to uni and they're professionals who work in white-collar jobs on computers in air conditioned offices, you grow up seeing every day what's available to you. You don't question it; it just happens. But that's not what it's like on the north-west coast of Tasmania, certainly not in my day, and that's not how I saw myself. For me, I went to TAFE. I studied at the same place as my mum. My dad drove trucks. And when I was a teenager, I lived in public housing. I dropped out of year 11 and I joined the Army. Don't get me wrong: I'm proud of that. I'll always be proud of that. I'm proud of where my experiences and my community got me, and it was a good life. And I'm so proud of all the decent people on the north-west coast living in the rural and regional areas of Tasmania who quietly do so much to make our state and our country a better place to live. But I know what opportunity means to many in those rural and regional areas of Tasmania, and I know what it means to sustain it or to suffocate it. I know how hard it can be for people who live there to make their way into a place like this. It's still too hard; we aren't living in the land of opportunity yet, and it seems to get further and further away.
I carry the weight of what I'm up here for and the people who live where I'm from. They know I'm here, and to them I might as well be in a foreign country. They see me rubbing shoulders with you guys and they see me on TV, mixing it up with the kinds of people who are supposed to be on the TV news. I hope that when they see me they think: 'Well, if she's got there, I can get there too. I can do it better than Lambie can!' And they'd probably be right!
Senator McKim interjecting—
If they were! It would be better than sending McKim too! If there were more of those guys up here the country would be a lot better off, I can tell you! But I can feel them watching me now. Every decision I make in this place, I feel them watching me. I want to be a good example for the kids, for our kids of the future. Many of them I'll never meet, and those parents wonder if their children really can be whatever they want to be when they grow up—if that opportunity will exist for their children.
More and more, there are kids in the rural and regional areas of Tasmania who want to work in politics when they grow up. They want to be politicians—God, forbid, knows why! They want to be on TV. They know they have things to say that the country needs to hear. I know those kids and their parents see what I do—maybe not on every bill and maybe not on every vote. But they have skin in the game, even if they don't know it; they're trusting me to stand here and make the right choices.
That's how I come at this bill. That's what's on my mind when I look at what the government is trying to do, because I know that the members of the Morrison government have no idea what it's like to fight tooth and nail to get the opportunities you deserve—not to have everything passed to you on a silver platter by mummy and daddy. That's the reality of most Australians. Those government members have no idea what it's like to be the first one in your family to make it to uni or to find yourself moving in social circles in this place. They have no idea what it's like to make your way around people who talk with an accent that's different to yours and who use words that your parents wouldn't understand. They have no idea how scary it is to enter into that.
That's what I'm thinking about when it comes to this bill. And I'll be damned if I'll vote to tell those kids in those rural and regional areas of Tasmania that they deserve to have their opportunities suffocated in a way they'll never even know. I'm not doing it. I'll never do that. I don't care what those opposite offer—they can offer me a billion bucks for Tasmania, but I won't sell out our kids in Tasmania. I will never do that, nor will I ever sell out any other Australian kid when it comes to their education. I will never, ever, ever do that! I'm not going to be the one who gets here and tells them to bugger off because I'm right, I've got mine. I refuse to be the vote that tells poor kids out there, or those sitting on that fine line—no matter how gifted and no matter how determined you are—'You might as well dream a little cheaper, because you're never going to make it. Because you can't afford it.' I won't take that from them—I won't be a part of that.
No one vote can stop a bill; it takes 38 of us up here to do that. And no vote can pass a bill either; it takes 39 to do that. Senator Griff isn't passing this bill by himself; he is one of 39. He just happens to be the 39th—and, trust me, as a crossbencher, I've been there before. It's not fair to lay the fault of this bill at the feet of Senator Griff. His decision to support this disappoints me, sure, but he didn't decide the other 38 votes who will line up next to him. He didn't do that! Everybody who votes for this bill is responsible for it passing. Any person sitting in favour of it can change their mind and beat it. It's not Senator Griff passing this bill, it's a majority of the Senate. Senator Griff's decision is just more heartbreaking, because 36 votes on that side are being told how to vote. That's right—at least Senator Griff has the opportunity to make his own mind up! The others just do as they're told—democracy at work, huh? Yeah—it's great, isn't it? They're told where to sit, they're told how high to jump and that's pretty much how it works when the bells ring. Those backbenchers get 200,000 bucks a year just to be told, 'Shut up, do as you're told and take the vote where I tell you to.' That's how it works. That's what they get paid for. God forbid! It's embarrassing, isn't it? But that's democracy, apparently.
I can live with the way I'm voting. I'll hold my head up high and if I lose votes for it, I'll lose them with pride. If I lose my seat, I'll lose it with pride. I didn't get into politics to hinder the futures of people or our kids—I'm here to help. If the price of staying in politics is betraying the people I'm here for, I'll leave with grace. My future isn't worth more than theirs. My goals, hopes and dreams aren't more important than those of our kids. I'm here for them. We're all supposed to be here for them. We're supposed to be here so they have a decent future, and we lay it out in front of them.
This will become law, and I'll go back to them and say: 'Hey guys, I really tried. I did what I could, but I fell short.' I will say to them: 'If I had a degree, maybe I may have won the day—maybe that would have made me a little bit smarter on my feet. Who knows?' I will say: 'If you're sick of people who've never known the kind of life that I've seen or you've seen deciding what's on the menu for people like you, beat them at their own game. If the tools it takes to win are only available to the well-off, they'll keep winning and we'll keep losing and the divide between the rich and poor will keep getting greater.' That's where this country is going.
It's worth unpacking what this bill is supposed to do. It's supposed to create more places at university. If you ask them for evidence that it will create more places then the room goes quiet. And even if it's making more places, it's giving no more money to universities to teach them. It's supposed to rely on funding with the cost of teaching. Sounds good to me, but the only bit of evidence they're relying on to set the cost of teaching is evidence nobody thinks is even close to reality. Then again, what's worth more: real life experience or an education? I guess if you had both it would make you a better person. It's supposed to be a bill that encourages people to study in areas where job prospects are the highest and discourage people from studying things where job prospects are the lowest. But it's cutting funding for engineering and science, and it's making it more expensive to study business. You don't think our economic future is going to need engineers, scientists or small businesses? It makes no sense.
If this were a good bill, it wouldn't have to rely on evaporating evidence to win over support. If this were a good bill, the evidence would be there for all to see. Instead, it's set to pass courtesy of a sweetheart deal for South Australia. Here is the rub: the bill is built to be budget neutral; it's about saving money. But sweetheart deals don't come for free. They just mean that more money is going to have to come from somewhere else and someone's going to have to pay the price. The question you need to ask yourself is where else is it going to come from—other states, other students? Who's going to lose so you can get this win?
I'm pleased to hear that Senator Griff has the support of the vice-chancellors of South Australian universities. It's important that they're supportive. I can see how that might help persuade someone to support this bill. It doesn't persuade me much though. I don't take advice on how to help poor kids from the three blokes making one million bucks a year, I can assure you of that much. I sure as hell won't listen to the vice-chancellor, having heard from the rest of the University of Tasmania, who were right up against their own vice-chancellor and who said, 'Do not take that deal.' I've seen it for what it was; I've seen what the majority wanted. That's how it works. I heard the rest of the Australian universities and the rest of the kids.
I come from a place in Tasmania with the lowest graduation rates in the country. If there's anybody who knows anything about what it means to be locked out of university, it's me. I live and breathe the north-west coast; it's in my bones. I'll tell you this right now: the north-west coast isn't patting you on the back for this and neither are the bloody kids down there. They're never going to thank you for taking away their dreams, their futures and making their lives even more miserable.
I'm thinking about them when I decide how to vote; I don't know what we're debating or what we're doing today. They will be looking at courses a few years from now, wondering how it got so expensive, how we let it get so bad and how we let them down. I didn't let them down; it was the people on the other side. They won't remember your name. They won't remember this bill. They will treat the world we're creating for them today as the world as it is—one where rich kids get the course of their dreams and the poor kids get the scraps.
Nothing changes. It will be one where rich kids get discounts and poor kids get debts, where, if you can't afford to study full-time, you fail, you lose, you're out, you're finished, you're gone. Get on the damn dole queue. University is not for you unless you can buy your way into it; that's where we're going now. You want to go to university? Good. Go eat noodles and get two or three jobs, while the rich kids get everything from mummy and daddy. It's a great example to set for Australia. I cannot see anything more un-Australian, to be honest. It makes me feel really sick that it's actually come to this. Is this what we want—a country with such a divide between the rich and the poor, with very few of the ones in the middle left? We haven't got to the middle of next year with COVID yet.
But you know what really, really annoys me about the Liberal and National parties more than anything? This will hit the most vulnerable first. If it's not our veterans, our aged or those totally permanently incapacitated soldiers out there, it's the students. You will go after those who are the most vulnerable and you sure as hell go after those who don't give you political donations. This is killing the country. This is not the way forward. It's time you put the country first and put your ideology in a suitcase, because it's enough.